A WALK AMONG THE DEAD

Early this morning, as I often do, to get a perspective on my life, I walked among the stones and crosses in Jersey City's Holy Name Cemetery.

Last week when I wrote that we should get out of Afghanistan because, as in Vietnam, the cost of the war dead — both military and civilian — exceeded whatever the war might win, a reader replied, "Aren't they all paid volunteers?"

As if to say: since they had freely gone to war, their death was less a loss. After all, they knew what they were getting into.

Another reader replied that, in effect, some had died because they were poor. Because they could not afford to go to college they had been drawn into the military with the hope that this would help them in life —not thinking that they would be killed.

Unless I have misread the note, I think the first reader has lost sight of the fact that every human being, including the enemy, is special, precious, unique. Made in the image of God. We should mourn enemy dead as well as our own.

On June 24, 1969, Life magazine made history when it devoted six full pages to print the pictures of 217 of the 242 men who had been killed in Vietnam from May 28 to June 3. The editors said they did the story because "more than we must know how many, we must know who." One of the men had just written home, "I am writing this is a hurry, I see death coming up the hill."

One of the moral tragedies of war is that human beings are denied their individuality, their personhood. They are statistics, the faceless numbers of dead. When our remote control drone, guided by a technician in Utah, bombs a house full of a dozen Afghanistan or Pakistani families to "eliminate" one suspected Taliban, the other uncounted dead civilians are not even called people, they are "collateral damage," as if they were furniture, as if it was their fault that they just got in our way.

We never see their faces nor hear the mothers weep.

The day after my Voices piece appeared, May 19, the New York Times reported that the Afghanistan war had taken the lives of 1002 service members and it published in a two-page spread the pictures of 498 men who had died since late July 2008. They include three from New Jersey: Salvatore S. Corma, 24, of Wenonah; Christopher R. Herbk, 25, of Westwood; and Ronald Kubik, 21, of Brielle.

My favorite spot in Holy Name Cemetery is a central area devoted to priests, nuns and veterans. Across the path from 50 nuns who died in the 19th century are about 200 weather-beaten stones marking the graves of men from the Civil, Spanish-American and First World Wars. The stones do not say whether they enlisted or were drafted. All served, many died. If the South would not have clung to slavery, if America had contained its lust for empire, and if the crown heads of Europe had kept their wits, all these wars could have been prevented. Meanwhile, this beautiful old graveyard has run out of burial plots and they have constructed new towering shiny marble mausoleums — some day to be the resting place for victims and veterans of the Afghanistan War.